Saturday, January 31, 2015

In 2006 Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker published an important article on sudden changes in the religiosity of youth. They were interested in what happens when youth are converted or lose their faith. From a relativistic perspective these can be argued to be the same phenomenon viewed from different perspectives. They wanted to know what were sociologically contributing factors to this process. What they found was that the two phenomenon were not the same and that different factors contributed to the different processes:

Thus it may be helpful to think of positive religious transformation and conversions (involving sharp growth in religiosity) and religious apostasy (i.e., losing religion) as two separate entities, each with its own set of mechanisms and patterns. The presence of the one has little in common with the absence of the other.

Using the data from the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) they were able to say the following about sudden religious conversions. In the first place:

There is no clear religious "hot spot" during adolescence, although age 18 appears to be the most active or unstable age for both directions of considerable religious change. A larger percentage of these oldest respondents exhibited both considerable growth and decline when compared with other youth of younger ages.

(Regnerus and Uecker, "Finding Faith, Losing Faith," 226-27.)

Apparently, how religious one's peers or parents were does not impact religious conversion. Behavior also does not seem to play much of a role:

Family and behavioral effects tend to receive considerable attention. yet their effects here are largely absent, save for an association with greater family satisfaction.

(Regnerus and Uecker, "Finding Faith, Losing Faith," 227.)

In this age group, demographic factors play a more important role than behavioral factors in conversion. In losing faith behavioral factors play a more important role than demographic ones.

Sexual status and behavior do matter for rapid and significant religious decline. Youth who reported already having had sex (i.e., being a non-virgin) are more likely to report a large decrease in both attendance and personal religious salience. The act of first sex (i.e., virginity loss between study waves) does not appear to alter attendance habits but did correspond significantly with a large decrease in the importance that adolescents accord to religion. Thus one's sexual status and behavior appear unrelated to whether or not adolescents increase their religiosity, but they correspond to their likelihood of considerable religious decline (especially that of personal religious salience). Sex is, however, the only behavioral association noted in this study. Alcohol and drug use display no such patterns of association in either regression table.

(Regnerus and Uecker, "Finding Faith, Losing Faith," 229.)

The data that Regnerus and Uecker were using are fairly blunt instruments. It was not gathered with this sort of study in mind. They warn that "these data do not capture all aspects of adolescent religious transformation" (Regnerus and Uecker, "Finding Faith, Losing Faith," 233).

Where do families come into this?

Families where parents are high in religiosity seem to foster in adolescent children a rapid growth in religious salience and (especially) attendance, as well as to prevent rapid loss of either form of religiosity. . . . Family structure plays a more powerful role in rapid religious decline in growth: youth in single-parent families appear much more likely to exhibit considerable decline in either type of religiosity when compared with adolescents in biologically intact, two-parent households. Adolescents in alternate family structures . . . are similarly more likely to display a considerable decline in church attendance.

(Regnerus and Uecker, "Finding Faith, Losing Faith," 230-31.)

Two points for families come out of this research:

Intact, two-parent families as well as step-families tend to provide religious stability for adolescents. [Other researchers] previously identified parental divorce as a predictor of apostasy or switching. . . . Adolescents living in a single parent family or in another family structure . . . appear to be at a higher risk of experiencing considerable religious decline.

Finally, parents influence adolescent religious change through the quality of the parent-child relationship. Higher levels of family satisfaction boost the odds of a sharp increase in attendance and salience.

(Regnerus and Uecker, "Finding Faith, Losing Faith," 233.)

These studies predict general trends of the masses. They do not dictate the particular path of individuals. Finding faith and losing faith are complex individual processes and these studies simply highlight important factors contributing to the decisions of individual souls.

Friday, January 30, 2015

While youth who leave the Church do so for a number of reasons (see here), some of them deserve further exploration. Every youth who leaves the Church does so because of their own choices, but there are things that others do that can influence their choices in subtle and perhaps unexpected ways. Here I will examine a fairly recent article on the subject: Hsien-Hsein Lau and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, "Parental Divorce and Adult Religiosity: Evidence from the General Social Survey," Review of Religious Research 53/1 (September 2011): 85-103.

The research does not directly look at Latter-day Saints because the researchers actually threw out all their LDS data. The general picture seems to work with the religions they did look at with some differences in degree but not of kind.

Lau and Wolfinger look at the effect that a parent's divorce has on their children's religiosity. The researchers propose a number of hypotheses, about half of which were not supported by the data.

They conclude that:

The children of divorce are disproportionately likely to reject any faith they were raised in, or adopt religion if they grew up without one. (p. 98.)

In particular, parental divorce leads to apostasy for people who grew up with formal religion, but simultaneously induces people who grew up unaffiliated to find faith. (p. 99.)

How big a difference does divorce make?

Coming from a divorced family doubles the likelihood that Protestants, liberal or conservative, will become apostates. (p. 95.)

Additionally,

Parental divorce approximately doubles the likelihood that people who grow up as Catholics will become apostates as adults. (p. 93.)

For these researchers an apostate is someone who loses all their faith and becomes irreligious. Another effect of divorce is that

respondents from divorced single-parent families are more than twice as likely to change to another religion (p. 92).

Divorce is not the only thing that causes that sort of effect:

Our analysis indicates that the death of a parent while growing up increases the likelihood of denominational change. This is a surprising result given that many studies have concluded that parental death has negligible long-term effects on offspring. (p. 99.)

This study did not find any significant decrease in attendance associated with divorce, although I would guess that apostatizing would have some effect on attendance.

The study incidentally noticed a few other family issues that happen when children are young that later affect their religiosity as adults:

Children raised in acrimonious households are less likely to carry on with their parents' faith. Changing religions is more likely when the quality of the relationship between children and parents is poor. Similarly, Loveland suggests that people who spend less time with relatives are more likely to switch religions. (86-87, references omitted.)

All of these factors do not change the fact that the individual makes his or her own choices. It does suggest that family dynamics can play a role. Studies like this one underscore the importance of families. Parents need to be careful: "when they saw your conduct they would not believe in my words" (Alma 39:11).

The flip side of this study is that we can expect that many who join the Church will come from a background of broken homes without much a religious background. This brings its own challenges.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Lincoln Blumell's brand new article on the textual criticism of Luke 22:43-44 casts recent statements by Craig Blomberg in an interesting light. In Blomberg's recent apologetic work for inerrancy, he claims:

A famous two-verse variant appears in Luke 22:43-44. In the middle of Jesus's agony in the garden of Gethsemane, we read that "an angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground." The NIV offers the following footnote at this point: "Many early manuscripts do not have verses 43 and 44." Many others do. The external evidence is quite split: about half of the oldest and most reliable manuscripts contain these sentences, and about half don't. The vast majority of all the late manuscripts contain them, but their evidence doesn't weigh that heavily in a decision. There is nothing terribly "hard" about this reading, especially when we realize that Luke is employing a simile: Jesus's sweat is like drops of blood. The text does not say he actually sweats blood. So it seems more likely that some overly pious scribe wanted to add a supernatural dimension to the story, with the role of the angel strengthening Christ, than that someone omitted these verses despite finding them in the manuscript he was copying.

Blomberg gets the manuscript evidence wrong. As Blumell notes that many scholars misconstrue the manuscript evidence for the passage "and so our earliest extant piece of manuscript evidence for Luke 22
attests vv. 43–44!" (p. 6). Blumell also shows that early Christian authors note embarrassment over the notions that Jesus suffered in the garden (any good Stoic should know that a real man can face pain and torture) and also note that Christian copyists had deleted the passage.

One has to wonder, since Blomberg is defending the tampered text as inerrant what does that say about his inerrancy arguments?

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Ziony Zevit is Distinguished Professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. The archaeologist, William Dever, describes Zevit's work, The Religions of Ancient Israel, as

"the most ambitious, the most sophisticated, the most important study of ancient Israelite religions ever undertaken." Such high praise is due, of course, to Zevit's extensive use of archaeological evidence, often based on first-hand re-examination and treated with an expertise that I have not seen in any other non-specialist. Certainly no other current biblicist can match Zevit's command of a broad range of archaeological data, which he, like me, takes as a "primary source" along with texts.

In a more recent work on Genesis 2-3 Zevit describes various types of approaches to the biblical text. The first he terms "the 'Mosaic-authorship' approach." This approach maintains that Moses wrote the Pentateuch except the last few verses of Deuteronomy which describe Moses's death. The second he terms "the literary-historical approach" which views the Pentateuch as written by various authors or schools of authors that are labeled with the letters J, E, P, and D. Zevit notes that

The important question for individuals open to this approach, then, is not whether this type of composition was practiced . . . but whether it played a role in the formation of the Pentateuch.

Zevit goes through this discussion because he consciously adapts his discussion to work with either of the two approaches. He assesses some of the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches:

Both the Mosaic-authorship and the literary-historical approaches focus on the literature of the Pentateuch. The first emphasizes continuities and prefers to avoid complexities that historical considerations introduce to a consideration of the text. The second emphasizes literary discontinuities and posits complex historical considerations to explain them.

(Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, 44.)

Zevit notices something strange, however, in the two approaches:

the Garden story considered below, regularly assigned to the J source, is considered the distillation of a literary tradition whose oral antecedents took shape around two centuries earlier, around 1100 BCE, close to some of the dates proposed by the Mosaic-authorship approach.

(Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, 42.)

So the two approaches approach the same date.

Zevit notes that "Kenneth A. Kitchen, a world-class Egyptologist and scholar of ancient Near Eastern civilizations" does not fit in either camp because he "introduces history into the first approach . . . in order to tweak and improve an approach that he believes is essentially insightful, useful, and not in opposition to faith" (Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, 45).

Zevit notes that when the literary-historical approach is adapted for faith that the resultant approach

is very heavy on the "literary" and absolutely unresponsive and hostile to historical considerations. [Such] uncompromising views allow little space for conversation. Kitchen's approach, in contrast, is heavy on the "historical" and generally, but not absolutely, unresponsive to the literary analysis of critical scholars. He does allow, though, for slight changes in the text that may have crept in over the centuries during which the scribes copied and recopied the text.

(Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, 46.)

(I note parenthetically that I am open to the possibility that the Pentateuch had numerous sources, extensive scribal errors, and heavy-handed redaction, probably much more than Kitchen. I am, however, skeptical of the ability of modern scholarship to accurately detect such things without hard evidence. Methodologically it is safer to be a factualist like Kitchen.)

Zevit's observations provide an interesting way of looking at recent discussions about the Old Testament that have been occurring among some Latter-day Saint scholars.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Many biblical scholars argue that biblical historical narratives (think things like Kings) were written, or for some scholars made up, years after the fact. Certainly in their current form, they can date no earlier than "the thirty-seventh year of the captivity of Jehoiachin" (2 Kings 25:27) about 561 B.C. Some scholars, nevertheless date them to the Persian period or Hellenistic period rather than the Neo-Babylonian period. The claim is that Kings presents a fictive narrative made up years after the fact to provide Judah with a national history that it never had.

What does a fictive narrative put together years after the fact look like? The apocryphal book of 1 Esdras is a good candidate. I am comfortable with a Hellenistic date for 1 Esdras but am willing to consider other options. I will briefly summarize the narrative adding actual historical dates in parentheses.

The narrative begins when "Josiah (640-609 B.C.) conducted the Passover to his Lord in Jerusalem." (1 Esdras 1:1).

Then "Pharaoh, king of Egypt, came to wage war in Carchemesh on the Euphrates" and Josiah was killed (1 Esdras 1:23-29). The source for this is the book of Kings (1 Esdras 1:31).

Then Jehoahaz (609 B.C.) became king of Judah (1 Esdras 1:32).

Then Jehoiakim (609-598 B.C.) became king of Judah (1 Esdras 1:37).

"Against him arose Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon" (1 Esdras 1:38).

So Zedekiah (597-586 B.C.) was appointed king over Judah (1 Esdras 1:44).

In the first year of the reign of Cyrus (585-550 B.C.) as king of Persia (1 Esdras 2:1).

Then came the reign of Artaxerxes I (465-424 BC) as king of Persia (1 Esdras 2:12).

The author of 1 Esdras cannot get the reigns of the Persian rulers in proper order. The only place where he gets the rulers in the right order is when he is relying on the book of Kings, which he cites as a source.

This can be contrasted with the order of Assyrian rulers in the books of Kings:

First comes the reign of Pul who is also called Tiglath-pileser (745-727 B.C.) (2 Kings 15:19, 29; 16:7, 10).

The book of Kings gets the Assyrian rulers in the correct order even though, when its final form was written, the Assyrian empire no longer existed (and had not for at least a couple of generations), nor did its records (which were discovered over two millennia later in situ). Given the hash of history that 1 Esdras presents us with, why would we expect that the writer of Kings would get the order of an earlier dead empire correct if he did not have access to more or less accurate historical records?

Sunday, January 25, 2015

For the time being, I am accepting the assumption that literacy was not widespread in ancient Israel even though I am aware of evidence that suggests that literacy was more widespread than most assume. You basically need at least one person in every village (about 200-250 people) that can read or write to serve as the scribe and larger places would need more than one scribe simply because the work load would require it. People from hamlets or outlying homesteads would have to go into town if they needed a scribe.

Most documents from antiquity simply do not survive. Most of them are written on perishable surfaces. They are destroyed, on purpose, on accident, with the passage of time. Many of them are buried and never found. Even of a civilization filled with writing, like ancient Egypt, only a small fragment of what once existed survives. Most of it is gone, mostly irretrievably so. Consider the example of P. Wilbour. This is a large scale tax survey of farmers and their produce. There should have been at least one of these rolls for every one of 42 nomes for the three thousand year span of pharaonic history. There should have been at least 126,000 of them. We have one. So the vast bulk of the documentation that once existed does not survive.

Evidence for writing in ancient Israel dates at least to the tenth century. Given that this is the time of the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, this is about what we should expect. Archaeological finds of writing are a small percentage of what was produced. Thus in order to expect to find any writing, much needs to be produced. The main reason for writing to be produced are for legal and administrative reasons. The bulk of ancient writing finds are actually administrative documents. So if you want to find documents of any sort, you usually need to have a state with a bureaucracy. This does not mean that writing and literacy were not available earlier but it would be harder to find archaeologically.

Granted that the amount of administrative and legal material (often grouped together as documentary materials) would be the bulk of writing, we need to consider what percentage of surviving material we could expect to be literary (what we would think of as being part of a library). In Ugarit (a coastal town destroyed about 1200 BC that spoke a language closely related to Hebrew) they have published 1418 Ugaritic tablets (a number of Akkadian and Hurrian tablets have also been published), 176 of which are literary. That amounts to about one literary tablet for every eight tablets. On the Trismegistos database, of 76,182 Greek documents 11,219 are literary (covering over 4000 authors). That is about one in seven texts. So the numbers are roughly consistent between the two corpora and the number of texts in each case is statistically significant.

We can also define two other ratios. In Ugaritic tablets there are 17 times as many literary texts as legal texts. In Greek texts there are 1.5 times as many ostraca as literary texts.

In ancient Israel (and I include Judah in this as well), the major writing surface was papyrus, but only one pre-exilic papyrus has been found. (Papyrus decays in moist climate and while there are desert places in Israel the population tends to live in places that are not conducive to papyrus preservation; this is true of Egypt too.) Nevertheless, thousands of bullae have been found. Bullae are the mud seal impressions from papyrus documents. If later documents are any indication, they were used on legal texts. Even if we assume that the 161 bullae published by Avigad and Sass were the only ones from ancient Israel, if the ratios from ancient Ugarit hold, we should expect that there were at least 2700 literary papyri from pre-exilic Israel that would have survived if the climate did not destroy papyrus. Many of these would have been duplicates but with those numbers we could expect about 900 literary compositions (based on Greek ratios). Let's take that as a high estimate. (If we wanted an ultra-high estimate we would base it on the thousands of bullae found and multiply it five-fold: 13500 literary papyri with 4500 literary compositions. Let's err on the side of caution.)

A lower estimate would be to take the number of ostraca that have survived. Wimmer published 133 that had hieratic numerals, but Dobbs-Allsop lists 228 Hebrew ostraca from excavations. There is a partial overlap between these groups of texts. Rather than sorting out the total number of ostraca, I will just take the latter figure. Doing so yields an expectation of 152 literary texts which should total about 51 different works. Let's take that as a low estimate. By comparison, the Hebrew Bible comprises 39 works, 12 of which (1-2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Lamentations, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi) are definitely post-exilic, leaving at most 27 pre-exilic books, two of which (2 Kings, Jeremiah) did not receive their final form until after the exile. So the low estimate yields about twice as many literary works from pre-exilic Israel as we have preserved. (The high estimate yields twenty-three times as many works as have survived in the Hebrew Bible.)
We can look at the problem another way. Dever estimates the population of the divided monarchy at about 150,000 people (The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel, 72). One scribe for every 500 people would mean that each harvest month (and different crops had different harvest times), the scribe would have to deal with 15-20 taxpayers a day all month. (Note that this is a smaller ratio of scribes per people than I used above.) That ratio still gives 300 scribes in the country. Spreading 152 literary papyri (our low estimate) over 300 scribes means that only every other village had a literary scroll. The high end estimate means that a typical village has on average only 9 literary works in the whole village (some would have more and some less). These numbers seem at least reasonable; but they are still guesses.

These papyri would be only a part of what once existed. It
would be a mistake to assume that only what has survived in the Bible
was what was available in ancient Israel and Judah.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Christopher Rollston is a good Hebrew epigrapher and because of his epigraphic perspective has some interesting and useful things to say about scribal education in ancient Israel.

It is worth noting that Rollston is not one of those who argues for high rates of literacy in ancient Israel:

The data do not support the contention that a high rate of literacy is a necessary corollary of a society with an alphabetic writing system.

(Christopher A. Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010], 128.)

Dramatic conclusions, such as the literacy of the non-elite populace, require dramatic evidence.

(Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, 131.)

Rollston cautions that the epigraphic record (such as I analyzed yesterday) can be misread:

It is often noted that there are more Old Hebrew inscriptions from the seventh through sixth centuries than there are from the eight and ninth centuries, which is seen as evidence that literacy was spreading among the populace. I would point our in respoinse that a small coterie of professional scribes during any chronological horizon could produce very large numbers of inscriptions without much difficulty.

(Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, 133.)

Nonetheless, Rollston notes that there is a remarkable consistency among the epigraphic material from ancient Israel. It is harder to detect individual hands. This consistency has a number of implications that Rollston draws out.

For example, some have argued for a functional literacy in ancient Israel, that is people who could read and write but were not very good at it (something like Joseph Smith in nineteenth century America). Some scholars have presumed that functional literacy was widespread; others have argued that illiteracy was so widespread that even the scribes were only functionally literate. Rollston addresses this issue:

The lion's share of the Old Hebrew epigraphic record does not reflect "functional literacy" of the script. It reflects the sophisticated knowledge of trained professionals.

(Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, 107.)

Rollston also addresses the issue of scribal education:

It is simply not convincing to attempt to account for the Old Hebrew epigraphic data without positing some sort of formal, standardized education. After all, the production of formal, standardized, and sophisticated epigraphs necessitates the presence of formal, standardized scribal education.

(Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, 113.)

As a result,

Professional scribes of Old Hebrew were among the most learned practitioners of writing and reading. Scribes were often part of the royal administration. The majority of the extant Old Hebrew inscriptions are administrative in nature.

(Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, 128.)

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that scribes were the only literate members of society:

Ultimately, I have argued that nothing else can account for the quality and consistency of these Old Hebrew epigraphs: formal, standardized scribal education is the most rational means of accounting for the quality of the Old Hebrew epigraphic materials. Nevertheless, I do not believe that those functioning as scribes were the only literate elites. Rather, I believe that at least some of the royal and temple officials would also have been literate.

(Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, 129, emphasis in original.)

Rollston addresses the implications of the epigraphic material for the production of literary texts which is worth quoting in extenso:

Finally, lest my arguments about literacy in ancient Israel be miscontrued, I should like to emphasize the obvious: the epigraphic evidence demonstrates that elites in ancient Israel were writing during the Iron IIA (900-800 B.C.E.), Iron IIB (800-722 B.C.E.), and Iron IIC (722-586 B.C.E.). Thompson has written that "we cannot seek an origin of literature in Palestine prior to the eighth, or perhaps even better the seventh-century" (1992, 391). With all due respect to Thompson, I must state that his position is in direct conflict with the epigraphic evidence and I do not consider his position to be at all defensible. After all, southern Levantine states are producing monumental inscriptions (e.g., the Mesha Stela, the Amman Citadel Inscription, the Tel Dan Inscription). Moreover, there is a distinct Old Hebrew national script that is already attested during the ninth century. Finally, this script is even used in a foreign region, by a foreign monarch, to inscribe a monumental text in a foreign language (Mesha Stela). It would be most difficult to argue that a culture capable of developing and employing a distinct national script with a developed scribal culture did not have the capacity to write texts of various sorts.

Someone might retort that the Israelites were capable of writing during Iron IIA, but not capable of writing "literature." Naturally, however, this would be a very strained argument. To put it positively, I am absolutely certain that a nation (Israel) that has a scribal apparatus that is capable of developing a national script and employing standardized orthographic conventions is certainly capable of producing literature.

(Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, 134-35.)

As someone who works seriously with the epigraphic record, Rollston's views are worth serious consideration.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Yesterday morning the new issue of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism came out. The lead article is by my colleague, Lincoln Blumell. It deals with the textual criticism of Luke 22:43-44. This is the passage in the gospel of Luke that deals with Jesus sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane and the angel appearing to him and strengthening him. Several New Testament manuscripts drop this passage. The conventional wisdom has been that this passage was added later. Blumell turns that on its head. He shows that the earliest manuscripts actually had the passage but that Christians were criticized for it in the second and third centuries and so they dropped the passage from their Bibles. Anyone interested in the textual history of this passage would be well advised to carefully consider Blumell's argument.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Recent discussion on the Old Testament assumes that literacy was not common. It may not have been, but the assumption appears to be that it was less common than it may have actually been. One of the larger problems is that the arguments proceed on the basis of assumptions without actual data. It is worth looking at how much inscriptional evidence from pre-exilic Israel there actually is. The following information is culled from F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow, and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). I have only included the provenanced inscriptions.

Many of the eighth century inscriptions might be seventh century. At any rate, during pre-exilic times a scribal culture is well attested in Judah and Israel. We should note that the inscriptional material listed is confined to ostraca (potsherds), pottery vessels, and stone surfaces. This, however, it not the main writing surface that was used in ancient Israel and Judah. While animal skins are a possibility, the best attested writing surface archaeologically is papyrus. This is because bullae, mud seal impressions with impressions of the papyri and sting on the back attest to papyrus documents being used even if the papyrus no longer survives.

The year that Hebrew Inscriptions came out, another tenth century inscription was found at Tell Zeitah in Judah (see Richard Hess, "Writing about Writing," Vetus Testamentum 56/3 (2006): 342-46.

The tenth century inscriptions include two inscriptions indicating ownership, a scribal exercise, and a list of agricultural activities. The scribal exercise indicates that there is some form of scribal training. The ownership inscriptions have be taken to indicate how few people wrote. "What they
imply,
however,
is
a
greater
number
who
could
read
well
enough
to
distinguish
one
name
from
another." (Alan Millard, The Journal of Theological Studies 49/2 [1998]: 701-702.) There is no point of putting your name on something if no one can read it and know that it is yours. If people are going to mark objects with their names enough people have to read enough to know whose name it is. These are words not personal or corporate logos.

A significant number of the inscriptions come from large caches of texts (such as Arad, Lachish, Samaria, Gibeon). In only takes one of these to drastically change the picture.

Writing is more frequent in Judah than it is in Israel. The attested inscriptional evidence does not support a hypothesis that writing started in Israel and then moved to Judah. There is also no real basis for claiming that Judah was less "articulate" than Israel.

It might be possible that David and Solomon were able to run their empires without writing (though I doubt it). The Bible does not credit David with annals. Jeroboam, however, had spent time in the royal courts in Egypt and had seen what use writing could be. Solomon certainly had some exposure to the practices of courts in other countries as well. These are the kings that the Bible starts to attribute annals to. The inscriptional evidence shows a wide-spread scribal network throughout the Israelite monarchies. The tenth century, though, has enough inscriptional evidence to argue that the rise of Israelite literacy coincides with the rise of the Israelite state (which is what we find in both Mesopotamia and Egypt). We could always wish for more evidence, but we should not underestimate what we do have.

There is an argument making its rounds that (1) the historical authenticity of the scriptures (2) is unnecessary because (3) the biblical authors did not do
history because (4) they did not cite sources, because (5) their sources were all made up, because (6) ancient Israelite
scribes did not keep historical records like annals. I have been involved in this discussion. Point (1) is important. I see point (2) as misguided. I see point (3) as a silly opinion, and I see points (4) - (6) as factually wrong. I have dealt with points (4) - (6) before and here I am only going to deal with point (6).

In dealing with point (6) I adduced a lengthy list of biblical evidence that ancient Israelite scribes kept annals and I cited two scholars of divergent ideological persuasions (K. A. Kitchen and D. B. Redford) who agreed on the scribal practice (here). It is claimed here (and here) that my citing of K. A. Kitchen's remarks about the annals of the kings of Judah and Israel is flawed. Kitchen said:

First, it was common custom for ancient kingdoms (from the third
millennium onward) to keep a series of running records for hardheaded,
administrative purposes, on a daily, monthly, and annual basis. Naming
of years after significant events, and compiling lists of these years
with their events, perhaps formed rudimentary chronicles that recorded
actual facts and happenings of all kinds. Daybooks became customary,
whether called such or not, in the guise of running records as in
first-millennium Babylonia, or annotated lists of annual eponym officers
in Assyria. From these detailed running series of "annals" a variety of
writers could draw, in order to compose their own works on historical
matters. Such efforts could vary from such as the Babylonian Chronicle,
which gave a compact, objective digest of mainly political events
(military campaigns by successive kings, etc.), to more partisan texts
as in the Synchronous History (Grayson, no. 21, probably derived from a
stela) asserting Assyrian military and moral ascendancy over Babylonia.
Or we find "special interest" chronicles, such as the Akitu Chronicle
(no. 16), whose author noted years in which the Akitu feast of Marduk
was not celebrated in Babylon, along with contemporary events, and the
"Religious Chronicle" (no. 17), whose author noted celebration or
otherwise of temple feasts and was obsessed with wild animals straying
into Babylon (and there killed), among other phenomena.

So too with biblical Kings and Chronicles. These works are not the
official annals of Israel and Judah, but they explicitly refer their
readers to the official annals or daybooks (Heb. "daily affairs") of the
kings of Israel and Judah. From Wenamun, it is clear that the kings of
Byblos in the early eleventh century kept daybooks, incorporating
records of past sales of timber to foreign kingdoms such as Egypt. At
two removes, the king list of Tyre cited by Josephus after Menander of
Ephesus (from the latter's history of Tyre and neighbors) clearly draws
upon quite accurate tradition when compared with other evidence.
Neo-Hittite kingdoms such as Carchemish, Malatya, and Gurgum maintained
their royal traditions, as is implied by their known hieroglyphic texts.
Thus there is good reason to credit Israel and Judah with the same
practices as everyone else in their world, namely, keeping running
records upon which others (such as the authors of Kings and Chronicles)
could draw for data in writing their own "special interest" works. To
dismiss references to these "annals" of Israel and Judah is wholly
unjustified in this cultural context.

(K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003], 48-49.)

After quoting part of the passage I quoted, one respondent remarks:

No! Not so with biblical Kings and Chronicles! You really can’t do that!

Well, why not?

like many other Near Eastern studies in the past, Kitchen’s work is
suspect if for no other reason than as an Egyptologist (who also deals
with Mesopotamian texts), Kitchen fails to view biblical material in its
own unique historical and cultural context. Israelite scribal
traditions are not the same thing as Mesopotamian scribal traditions.
I’m going to be direct. Near Eastern scholars like Kitchen who fail to
properly contextualize this material often create a type of
“parallelomania” in Near Eastern society, which results in the
absorption of various distinct cultural and religious aspects into a
meaningless synchronic whole.

Apparently, Israelite society was wholly different from its ancient Near Eastern neighbors. You see, according to this line of thought, Judah just was not sophisticated enough to have annals:

The first evidence of an inland Canaanite script appears in Israel
during the 10th century BCE. We have alphabetic writing and official
seals from what would have been the period of this United Monarchy (if
the Biblical account is correct that such an entity existed). Hebrew
doesn’t exist as a written language until the 9th (perhaps 10th,
depending on how you classify “Hebrew”) century BCE. This means that
during the time period of biblical heroes such as Samuel, Saul, and
David that a written form of Hebrew was only beginning to take shape.
So the stories about these men do not stem from a contemporary written
royal record.

The northern kingdom of Israel seems to have developed a fairly advanced
society during the 8th century BCE. During this time, the southern
kingdom of Judah was much smaller and far less articulate. By the end
of the 8th century, however, Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians
(think of the famous “lost ten tribes”). Twenty years after the
destruction of Samaria, the Israelite elite had established a
significant presence in Judah, and that presence changed everything,
including the development of scribal texts that would eventually find
their way into our Bible. During the century or so between the Assyrian
destruction of Israel and the later Babylonian destruction of
Jerusalem, the kingdom of Judah followed Israel’s lead and developed an
extraordinary literary culture. By 586 (the year Babylon destroyed
Jerusalem), the Judean scribes had created their own literary texts that
developed Judean authority. And these texts would eventually find
their way into our Bible. This is the basic historical background for
the development of writing and literary sources in the kingdoms of
Israel and Judah. This is the historical background that must be taken
into consideration in a study of “historical reliability” in the scribal
works that appear in the Bible.

This line of argumentation is problematic. I think that this line of argument is wrong about what epigraphy says about the development of writing in Israel and Judah, but I will save that for another post. The fact that the response to my post cites only a portion of Kitchen's book that I quoted and the disgruntled review of someone whose position was demolished by Kitchen and the characterization of Kitchen as "an Egyptologist (who also deals
with Mesopotamian texts)" makes me wonder: Could it be that the author of the response has not read Kitchen's book and is even familiar with Kitchen's vast and varied output.

The argument also seems to have constructed something of a straw man. The sources I cited (here and here) do not claim annals for David and is divided about whether there were such for Solomon, although they do claim records for both. Annals are not consistently cited until the reigns of Jeroboam and Rehoboam.

Apparently, so the response would lead us to believe, real biblical scholars do not think that scribes from Israel and Judah drew up ancient annals of their kings.

Who would know about such a thing? Christopher Rollston received his PhD at Johns Hopkins University, and is currently
Associate Professor of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures at
George Washington University. He has taught courses in "Gods and Goddesses of the Ancient Near East, Dead Sea Scrolls, Critical
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), Pentateuch,
Deuteronomistic History, Wisdom Literature, Prophetic Texts, Second
Temple Jewish Literature, Archaeology of Syria-Palestine, Gender and
Ethnicity in the Bible, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Biblical and Epigraphic
Aramaic, Biblical and Epigraphic Hebrew, Hellenistic Greek, Septuagint,
Sahidic Coptic, Critical Introduction to the New Testament, Textual
Criticism of the Hebrew Bible." He has published in such venues as the Journal of Biblical Literature, and is the editor of Maarav. He is a biblical scholar and one of the best Hebrew epigraphers in America. He also has literally written the book on ancient Israelite scribal practice: Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel.

This is how Rollston describes the status of scribes in ancient Israel and Judah:

The scribe was an esteemed member of elite society. Note, for example, that the majority of the biblical references refer to scribes associated with the palace and temple. For example, the term sōpēr ham-melek, "scribe of the king," and "royal scribe" (2 Kgs 12:11; 2 Chr 24:11; cf. Esth 3:12; 8:9) suggest the close association of certain scribes with the palace (and thus in a position of power and status). There is also a reference to a šĕkat sōpēr, "scribal chamber" located within the royal palace (Jer 36:12), and the "house of Nathan the scribe" was under royal auspices (Jer 37:15, 20). Producing and maintaining royal records such as "the chronicles of the kings of Israel," "the chronicles of the kings of Judah," and "the chronicles of Solomon" were certainly among the responsibilities fulfilled by royal scribes (1 Kgs 11:41; 14:19, 29). Recording decrees and taking dictation were probably among the duties of scribes (Jer 36:32; Esth 1:19; 8:9-14; Dan 6:8). Furthermore, the epigraphic record demonstrates that scribes were also responsible for maintaining certain economic dockets (e.g. Reisner Samaria Ostraca). Within the Hebrew Bible, the term sōpēr śar has-sābāʾ, "scribe of the commander of the army" (2 Kgs 25:19; Jer 52:25) suggests that certain scribes were responsible for aspects of the military (e.g., mustering the troops, ordering rations, and so on), another indication of the royal affiliation on certain scribes. Naturally, scribes would be included among the śarîm, "officials," as also demonstrated by the presence of scribes in lists of officials (e.g., 2 Sam 8:17; 20:25; 2 Kgs 12:11; Jer 36:12). Because of the royal scribe's status as a literate high official, certain responsibilities connected with the temple sometimes devolved to the royal scribe (e.g., 2 Kgs 12:11; 22:3). The fact that a scribe was present, along with additional officials, during negotiations with Sennacherib's delegation, is also indicative of the power and prominence sometimes attained by a royal scribe (2 Kgs 18:18).

This is the evidence for the status of scribes in ancient Israel and Judah from the Hebrew Bible. It is worth noting that the functions of scribes in ancient Israel and Judah parallel those of scribes in ancient Mesopotamian and Egypt. The production of royal annals by royal scribes from Judah is not the mere fantasy of some third-rate scholar drunken with "parallelomania." Rollston, by analyzing biblical sources, independently confirms Kitchen's comparative analysis. So here we have a top-notch biblical scholar who agrees with Kitchen's view about the existence of the annals of the kings of Judah and Israel. (Rollston's analysis is supplemented by his immersion in the epigraphic material, which I will look at later.)

I am not saying that Israel and Judah were identical in all cultural respects, much less that either was culturally identical to ancient Assyria, or Babylon, or Egypt. Nevertheless, the basic social situation of scribes in each of these cultures seems similar. Scribes were attached to the palace or the temple, or representatives of those institutions in a local setting. They generated records to help in the management of all of those institutions. These records included economic, legal, literary, and (yes) historical texts (however biased they may have been). I am not arguing that these cultures were identical in all respects. Suggestions that ancient Judah was somehow dramatically different is special pleading and betrays a lack of basic knowledge of scribal practice in both ancient Judah and the ancient Near East.

Positing that royal scribes did not
keep royal annals is untenable given that we have preserved examples of royal
inscriptions found in archaeological contexts in both Judah (Siloam Inscription) and Israel (Tell Dan
Inscription). If royal scribes did not write these things, who did?
Furthermore the author of Kings refers to one of these inscriptions by
citing the royal annals (2 Kings 20:20) that it is argued did not exist because the theory preferred is not able to accommodate the basic
historical and archaeological facts.

One problem with those who do not take the historical authenticity of the Hebrew Bible seriously is that they cannot seem to do much with the historical information actually contained in the Bible. Many of them have been trained solely in literary approaches to the Bible and the ancient Near East. (For example, when I took Ugaritic we only read literary texts from Ugarit; we did not read any of the historical ones; I discovered the historical texts later on my own.) Literary approaches have some merit, but they are only one approach and not always the best one. Lacking training with historical documents, some biblical scholars can only deal with ancient texts as literature and sometimes lack any feel for using documents to answer historical questions. Many biblical studies programs simply do not teach their students about history or archaeology. I feel sorry for those who come out of such programs.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

There are reports (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) about a new fragment of the Gospel of Mark dated to AD 90. Sifting through the initial reports, I have a few initial reactions.

The dating to AD 90 is far too precise for paleography. Business hands are found on legal documents with precise dates and they are only datable to the nearest half century. Literary hands are harder to date and any date given that is more precise than the nearest century should be viewed with skepticism.

The papyrus was found with others in cartonnage. This means that we should expect the fragment to be small. I would not expect that it will have much in the way of textual variants because the size of the piece will probably preclude it from having a lot of text.

On the other hand, if it is really early, I would expect the text not to match the standard text very closely.

The style of the cartonnage should provide us with another dating criterion. Unfortunately, the photographs of mummy masks do not seem to be of the mask from which the papyrus was taken.

Papyrologists and archaeologists have different views of the objects that contain writing, and different views on issues associated with those objects. One of these issues is the ethical issue of extracting papyrus from cartonnage. Basically, imagine making a paper-mache object out of old newspapers. Hundreds of years later historians and art-historians will have different views about whether or not to destroy the paper-mache object to look at the historical newspapers. The difference in view comes from which object the scholar thinks is important. If you think the texts are more important, you will favor extracting them. If you think the crafted object is more important then you will favor not extracting the texts. There are advantages and disadvantages to both positions and what to do with an archaeological object sometimes involves certain trade-offs. Before they get on their high-horse, archaeologists should remember that archaeology involves systematic destruction.

Recently a couple of very good papyrologists assigned new dates to most of the New Testament papyri. Many of them dated much later than New Testament scholars have dated them. The theological dating of papyri tends to assign them much earlier than they should be. This looks like a case of theological dating. Craig Evans is a good and insightful New Testament scholar but he is not a papyrologist.

I would be somewhat surprised if the conditions existed in Egypt in the first century for a copy of the New Testament from that time period to be preserved. To make an argument for the existence of such a text also implies an argument for the state of Christianity in Egypt.

We will have to wait for the publication to appear before we can comment on more than probabilities. The publication is supposed to come out from Brill, but I cannot locate anything that looks like it on their list of forthcoming publications.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Craig Blomberg is an evangelical biblical scholar. Some evangelicals see him as "irenic and embracing with Mormons;" he sees himself as "irenic but not embracing with Mormons" (Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2014], 272 n. 6.). I have never seen him as all that irenic, though he may be less hostile than some. Perhaps the perception that he is too irenic is one of the reasons he takes misguided pot shots at Mormons in his book. Blomberg has had numerous encounters with Latter-day Saints and I think that some of Blomberg's Mormon interlocutors could have done a much better job defending their beliefs, and apparently so does he. He raises an interesting point at the end of his book. Referring to those who believe the Book of Mormon or the Qur'an he says:

One may be utterly convinced that God has testified to them of the truth of a sacred text of a particular religion, but if they cannot give viable intellectual answers to the problems that others perceive with that same text, one has to wonder if they have misjudged the source of their convictions.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Craig Blomberg is an inerrantist. I am not. Blomberg still takes a more skeptical view of biblical historicity than I do. Nevertheless, Blomberg makes an interesting point about the historicity of the Old Testament and the Old Testament writers' views of historicity:

The purpose of the miracle stories [in the Old Testament] is to counter the suggestion that any god but the Lord of Israel exists; only real events, not just mythical stories, could accomplish this.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

I have been informed that in certain circles I am considered hopelessly naive for taking the sources in Chronicles seriously. Any good biblical scholar (it is supposed) knows that the Chronicler made up all his sources. Those sources never existed. Unfortunately that argument does not wash. Consider the following list of sources he Chronicler cites and what they supposedly contained:

The book of Samuel the seer (1 Chronicles 29:29) supposedly contains accounts of David that the Chronicler drew on.

The book of Nathan the prophet (1 Chronicles 29:29; 2 Chronicles 9:29) supposedly contains accounts of David and Solomon that the Chronicler drew on.

The book of Gad the seer (1 Chronicles 29:29) also supposedly contains accounts of David that the Chronicler drew on.

The prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite (2 Chronicles 9:29) supposedly contains accounts of Solomon that the Chronicler drew on.

The visions of Iddo the seer (2 Chronicles 9:29, 12:15) supposedly contains accounts of Solomon, Jeroboam and Rehoboam that the Chronicler drew on.

The book of Shemaiah the prophet (2 Chronicles 12:15) supposedly contains accounts of Rehoboam that the Chronicler drew on.

The vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz (2 Chronicles 32:32) supposedly contains records of Hezekiah that the Chronicler drew on.

Of course, any real biblical scholar is supposed to know that all of these sources are fictional and none of them actually contains any records of those kings that the Chronicler was supposed to have drawn on. Except the book of the kings of Israel and Judah actually does exist, and does contain records of those kings, and it certainly appears that the Chronicler used it. The same is true for the vision of Isaiah.

So 60% of the time that the Chronicler cites a source, that source exists and has an account that the Chronicler claims to have drawn on, and appears to have actually drawn on. What does that tell us about the accuracy of the Chronicler? Sixty percent is the lowest passing grade; the bottom of the 'D's; but it is still a passing grade.

Look at it another way, though, one-hundred percent of the time when the Chronicler cites a source and that source exists, it has an account that covers more or less what the Chronicler says it does and that the Chronicler seems to have used in his account. With that sort of success rate, I am willing to trust that a source that the Chronicler had access to and claimed existed in his day probably did even though we do not have that source today.

Did the Chronicler shape the narrative his sources gave him to fit his own ends? I think he did, just like modern historians do. Did the Chronicler make some things up? He may have; modern historians sometimes do too. Was the Chronicler 100% accurate? Perhaps not, but neither are all modern historians. The point is not whether biblical authors were accurate, or tendentious, or objective, but whether they had some sense of history. Like a modern historian, the Chronicler used preexisting sources to tell the story that he was interested in and cited his sources.

I think it funny that some source critics will look everywhere for sources but will only accept as genuine the ones that they make up themselves.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The Onion is a satirical news source. James Toronto of the Wall Street Journal occasionally runs comparisons of Life Imitates the Onion when news stories sound too much like they might have come from the Onion. This is one such entry. Are we really supposed to believe that peas, grapes, oranges and mangoes are bad for you? Are nutritional experts really recommending "keeping fruit intake limited to one serving a day"? A real onion headline actually sounds more reasonable:

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Craig Blomberg, being a biblical scholar, has some insightful observations about biblical scholars:

In my thirty years of membership in the Society of Biblical Literature, the world's largest scholarly organization of professors of the Bible from just about any tertiary-level institution, whether confessional or nonconfessional in its perspective, there are two words that I have heard more than any others used as conversation stoppers. If a speaker wants to dismiss a more conservative scholarly perspective on an issue, all that is needed is to say something like "Well, that's just apologetics" or "That's a harmonizing approach." To actually mount a theological argument for a historic Christian position is enough to merit severe censure, never mind that members regularly argue for countless unorthodox Christian views. And to claim to be a responsible biblical historian while harmonizing seemingly discordant data in Scriptures, or between the Bible and the extracanonical information, dooms one to rejection and ridicule.

Calling something apologetics is supposed to (a) alleviate the speaker of any obligation to mount a counter-argument, and (b) shut the other person up. Instead of an argument, Blomberg notes that those who use this approach simply resort to name-calling. What triggers this opprobrium, according to Blomberg, is mounting an argument for an orthodox position. Nothing, apparently, could be worse than having orthodox beliefs and arguing for them.

The irony is that such charges are almost never pressed by scholars with firsthand experience in classical historiography.

(Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? 137.)

So the scholars who dismiss arguments by claiming that something is apologetics often have too narrow a focus. If they surveyed a wider scholarly terrain, they might recognize their special pleading.

Blomberg bemoans that fact that "even fellow evangelicals sometimes resort to inflated condemnation" (Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? 253 n. 67). He notes that some evangelicals "referred to such scholars [biblical scholars], including me [Blomberg], as experiencing a 'satanic blindness'" (Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? 142).

Blomberg notes other points of interest:

It is curious how emotionally charged the attacks . . . can become. Maybe this is because various scholars are unwilling to seriously countenance the possibility that one of their cherished contradictions in Scripture might actually be resolved.

(Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? 139.)

If Blomberg is right, then one should expect that accusations of apologetics are simply a means of calling others names in order to evade actually engaging their arguments.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Biblical authors were not historians, at least not in the modern
sense of the term. They were storytellers. Their accounts were
certainly sacred, but they were also entertaining, and sometimes even
political and crude. Biblical stories tell us something about the way
their respective authors understood the past, but they don’t always tell
us something about “the” past. The original authors who produced the
Bible created stories about prophets, kings, and heroic warriors that
were carefully crafted to teach valuable ideas concerning divinity and
its relationship to humanity, especially the family of Israel.

It’s
important for modern readers of the Bible to recognize that biblical
historians were not motivated to write their accounts out of antiquarian
interest. The past was far too important a tool for these authors to
simply recount what really happened. Instead, biblical authors
used history as a tool to covey themes concerning the God of Israel and
his relationship to his chosen people.

Bokovoy's larger argument is that members of the Church need not view their scriptures as historical, because, after all, the Israelites did not see their scriptures as historical. He sees Latter-day Saints who view their scriptures as historical as holding a problematic view:

For Hoskisson, if the scriptures do not present true history, they have
little value as a religious force. Whether right or wrong, this view is
difficult to reconcile with the way ancient authors traditionally viewed
“scripture.”

Bokovoy's original statements, however, do not square with the biblical record. In the books of Kings and Chronicles, the authors are consistently citing earlier sources:

And the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the book of the acts of Solomon? (1 Kings 11:41)

And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred, and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel. (1 Kings 14:19)

Now the rest of the acts of Rehoboam, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (1 Kings 14:29)

Now the rest of the acts of Abijam, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (1 Kings 15:7)

The rest of all the acts of Asa, and all his might, and all that he did, and the cities which he built, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (1 Kings 15:23)

Now the rest of the acts of Nadab, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (1 Kings 15:31)

Now the rest of the acts of Baasha, and what he did, and his might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (1 Kings 16:5)

Now the rest of the acts of Elah, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (1 Kings 16:14)

Now the rest of the acts of Zimri, and his treason that he wrought, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (1 Kings 16:20)

Now the rest of the acts of Omri which he did, and his might that he shewed, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (1 Kings 16:27)

Now the rest of the acts of Ahab, and all that he did, and the ivory house which he made, and all the cities that he built, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (1 Kings 22:39)

Now the rest of the acts of Jehoshaphat, and his might that he shewed, and how he warred, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (1 Kings 22:45)

Now the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (2 Kings 1:18)

And the rest of the acts of Joram, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 8:23)

Now the rest of the acts of Jehu, and all that he did, and all his might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (2 Kings 10:34)

And the rest of the acts of Joash, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 12:19)

Now the rest of the acts of Jehoahaz, and all that he did, and his might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (2 Kings 13:8)

And the rest of the acts of Joash, and all that he did, and his might wherewith he fought against Amaziah king of Judah, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (2 Kings 13:12)

Now the rest of the acts of Jehoash which he did, and his might, and how he fought with Amaziah king of Judah, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (2 Kings 14:15)

And the rest of the acts of Amaziah, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 14:18)

Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, and all that he did, and his might, how he warred, and how he recovered Damascus, and Hamath, which belonged to Judah, for Israel, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (2 Kings 14:28)

And the rest of the acts of Azariah, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 15:6)

And the rest of the acts of Zachariah, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel. (2 Kings 15:11)

And the rest of the acts of Shallum, and his conspiracy which he made, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel. (2 Kings 15:15)

And the rest of the acts of Menahem, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? (2 Kings 15:21)

And the rest of the acts of Pekahiah, and all that he did, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel. (2 Kings 15:26)

And the rest of the acts of Pekah, and all that he did, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel. (2 Kings 15:31)

Now the rest of the acts of Jotham, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 15:36)

Now the rest of the acts of Ahaz which he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 16:19)

And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 20:20)

Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and all that he did, and his sin that he sinned, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 21:17)

Now the rest of the acts of Amon which he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 21:25)

Now the rest of the acts of Josiah, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 23:28)

Now the rest of the acts of Jehoiakim, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? (2 Kings 24:5)

The books of chronicles are not those of our Bible, they are annals, written records of the accounts of historical deeds of the rulers. While they have not been preserved, we have comparable annals from other ancient Near Eastern cultures like Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. The annals of Hezekiah record his fashioning a conduit to bring water (2 Kings 20:20) for which the commemorative inscription has been discovered archaeologically. These ancient annals were produced for many of the same reasons that modern historical records of heads of state are preserved. The books of Kings cite them just as a modern historian would cite his sources. The tradition of keeping specific historical annals in both Israel and Judah starts after the reign of Solomon, which is an indication that this is not a formulaic phrase thrown in for effect.

The sources for the books of Chronicles are more varied:

they were written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah, who were carried away to Babylon for their transgression. (1 Chronicles 9:1)

Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of Samuel the seer, and in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the book of Gad the seer, With all his reign and his might, and the times that went over him, and over Israel, and over all the kingdoms of the countries. (1 Chronicles 29:29–30)

Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, first and last, are they not written in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and in the visions of Iddo the seer against Jeroboam the son of Nebat? (2 Chronicles 9:29)

Now the acts of Rehoboam, first and last, are they not written in the book of Shemaiah the prophet, and of Iddo the seer concerning genealogies? (2 Chronicles 12:15)

the acts of Asa, first and last, lo, they are written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. (2 Chronicles 16:11)

Now the rest of the acts of Jehoshaphat, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of Jehu the son of Hanani, who is mentioned in the book of the kings of Israel. (2 Chronicles 20:34)

Now concerning his sons, and the greatness of the burdens laid upon him, and the repairing of the house of God, behold, they are written in the story of the book of the kings. (2 Chronicles 24:27)

Now the rest of the acts of Amaziah, first and last, behold, are they not written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel? (2 Chronicles 25:26)

Now the rest of the acts of Jotham, and all his wars, and his ways, lo, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah. (2 Chronicles 27:7)

Now the rest of his acts and of all his ways, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. (2 Chronicles 28:26)

Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and his goodness, behold, they are written in the vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, and in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. (2 Chronicles 32:32)

Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and his prayer unto his God, and the words of the seers that spake to him in the name of the Lord God of Israel, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel. (2 Chronicles 33:18)

And his deeds, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah. (2 Chronicles 35:27)

Now the rest of the acts of Jehoiakim, and his abominations which he did, and that which was found in him, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah (2 Chronicles 36:8)

Whoever wrote Chronicles no longer had access to the various annals, but they did have recourse to the book of Kings, which was more or less the book of Kings that we have. We can check their references. They also reference records kept by various prophets and priests, who are precisely the type of people in the ancient Near East who were known to be literate and so could keep records. When they refer to the vision of Isaiah, this appears to be some form of the book of Isaiah that we still have and which contains at least some of this information. All of this shows the keeping of various historical records and referencing them similar to the way that modern historians do it.

Citation of earlier records also appears in other records. Here is a small sample:

Wherefore it is said in the book of the wars of the Lord, What he did in the Red sea, and in the brooks of Arnon, And at the stream of the brooks that goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth upon the border of Moab. (Numbers 21:14–15)

As Moses the servant of the Lord commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses (Joshua 8:31)

Is not this written in the book of Jasher? (Joshua 10:13)

Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses (Joshua 23:6)

Also he bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher. (2 Samuel 1:18)

We also know that in ancient Israel books were written for reference purposes so that they could be consulted in the future:

Then Samuel told the people the manner of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book, and laid it up before the Lord. (1 Samuel 10:25)

Here a record is made so that it may be consulted in the future. Similar reasons are cited in Hammurabi's stele establishing his law code. This is standard procedure in the ancient Near East.

Furthermore, prophetic books make records to known historical events that serve to anchor the events they talk about historically:

The words of Amos, who was among the
herdmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah
king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash king of
Israel, two years before the earthquake. (Amos 1:1)

The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea, the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel. (Hosea 1:1)

The word of the Lord that came to Micah the Morasthite in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. (Micah 1:1)

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. (Isaiah 1:1)

In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. (Isaiah 6:1)

And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, (Isaiah 7:1)

In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him,) and fought against Ashdod, and took it; At the same time spake the Lord by Isaiah the son of Amoz, (Isaiah 20:1–2)

The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin: To whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, unto the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah the son of Josiah king of Judah, unto the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month. (Jeremiah 1:1–3)

The word which came unto Jeremiah from the Lord in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah (Jeremiah 35:1)

The Lord said also unto me in the days of Josiah the king (Jeremiah 3:6)

And in the days of Artaxerxes wrote
Bishlam, Mithredath, Tabeel, and the rest of their companions, unto
Artaxerxes king of Persia (Ezra 4:7)

These
were in the days of Joiakim the son of Jeshua, the son of Jozadak, and
in the days of Nehemiah the governor, and of Ezra the priest, the
scribe. (Nehemiah 12:26)

The word of the Lord which came unto Zephaniah the son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hizkiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah. (Zephaniah 1:1)

Prophetic books also cite previous historical prophecies:

Micah the Morasthite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and spake to all the people of Judah, saying, Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Zion shall be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest. (Jeremiah 26:18)

This is a quotation of Micah:

Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest. (Micah 3:12)

Prophetic books also point to known events in the past as historical references:

they have deeply corrupted themselves, as in the days of Gibeah (Hosea 9:9, referring to the episode in Judges 19:12-30)

yea, ye shall flee, like as ye fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah (Zechariah 14:5)

All of this points to a historical consciousness among biblical writers. (I have deliberately excluded the Pentateuch which David seems to think is completely unhistorical, but one can find the same concerns there as well.)

At this point, it is worth citing a much more experienced and distinguished scholar of the ancient Near East on the subject:

First, it was common custom for ancient kingdoms (from the third millennium onward) to keep a series of running records for hardheaded, administrative purposes, on a daily, monthly, and annual basis. Naming of years after significant events, and compiling lists of these years with their events, perhaps formed rudimentary chronicles that recorded actual facts and happenings of all kinds. Daybooks became customary, whether called such or not, in the guise of running records as in first-millennium Babylonia, or annotated lists of annual eponym officers in Assyria. From these detailed running series of "annals" a variety of writers could draw, in order to compose their own works on historical matters. Such efforts could vary from such as the Babylonian Chronicle, which gave a compact, objective digest of mainly political events (military campaigns by successive kings, etc.), to more partisan texts as in the Synchronous History (Grayson, no. 21, probably derived from a stela) asserting Assyrian military and moral ascendancy over Babylonia. Or we find "special interest" chronicles, such as the Akitu Chronicle (no. 16), whose author noted years in which the Akitu feast of Marduk was not celebrated in Babylon, along with contemporary events, and the "Religious Chronicle" (no. 17), whose author noted celebration or otherwise of temple feasts and was obsessed with wild animals straying into Babylon (and there killed), among other phenomena.

So too with biblical Kings and Chronicles. These works are not the official annals of Israel and Judah, but they explicitly refer their readers to the official annals or daybooks (Heb. "daily affairs") of the kings of Israel and Judah. From Wenamun, it is clear that the kings of Byblos in the early eleventh century kept daybooks, incorporating records of past sales of timber to foreign kingdoms such as Egypt. At two removes, the king list of Tyre cited by Josephus after Menander of Ephesus (from the latter's history of Tyre and neighbors) clearly draws upon quite accurate tradition when compared with other evidence. Neo-Hittite kingdoms such as Carchemish, Malatya, and Gurgum maintained their royal traditions, as is implied by their known hieroglyphic texts. Thus there is good reason to credit Israel and Judah with the same practices as everyone else in their world, namely, keeping running records upon which others (such as the authors of Kings and Chronicles) could draw for data in writing their own "special interest" works. To dismiss references to these "annals" of Israel and Judah is wholly unjustified in this cultural context.

(K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003], 48-49.)

Now, lets consider the opinion of another scholar of the ancient Near East from a very different ideological perspective:

The [Egyptian] Middle Kingdom confronts us with a genuine and well-attested resuscitation of the past, albeit one which was consciously designed to serve the ends of the 12th Dynasty regime in power.

During the New Kingdom:

Interest in the past and its memorials increased. Sometimes it was genuine, if not academic, interest in the past for its own sake; mostly it involved piety attendant upon refurbishing ancestral monuments.

(Donald B. Redford, Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals and Day-Books: A Contribution to the Study of the Egyptian Sense of History [Missasauga, Ontario: Benben Publications, 1986], 334-35.)

If there is academic interest in the past for its own sake in Egypt in the last half of the second millennium B.C. there is no specific reason to suppose that there could not be academic interest in the past next door in Israel in the first half of the first millennium B.C. And, as we have seen, the Bible provides evidence for that sort of academic interest.

So the records left by ancient Israel show that they have some sense of history comparable to the modern sense of history. They kept historical records and referenced them to compile accounts of what actually happened in the past. They may have been biased and tendentious, and maybe even inaccurate at times, but they were historical. They meant to preserve a record of the past for their own and future generations. Ancient Israelites viewed the Bible (or at least significant portions of it) as historical records of actual historical events. Their view was much closer to Hosikisson's than Bokovoy would like it to be. Bokovoy's first premise does not hold and no sound argument can be based on it.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

I admire a number of things about Craig Blomberg. He is a seasoned New Testament scholar who has earned his place on the Committee for Bible Translation of the New International Version. I appreciate his efforts to strengthen those of his faith in their faith in the Bible. I am disappointed in some of his attacks on those of my faith. I am also disappointed in some of his arguments based on mistaken assumptions. Here is one of them:

The United Bible Societies' fourth edition of the Greek New Testament contains 1,438 of the most significant textual variants in its footnotes and presents the most important manuscript evidence for each existing reading of the disputed text. . . . The twenty-eighth edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament includes about seven times as many variants as the UBS fourth edition but then drastically limits the number of manuscripts listed in support of each reading. In Nestle-Aland, however, seldom do the extra variants not found in the UBS seem at all significant.

Blomberg actually does not discuss any significant variants that appear in Nestle-Aland but not in UBS. His purpose in writing is apologetic, to reassure evangelicals that textual variants are not a serious problem. I am less sanguine. Here is an example of a significant textual variant that is in Nestle-Aland but not in UBS. Both Nestle-Aland and UBS have the same text (they differ in the critical apparatus). For Galatians 5:19 they read:

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

I have provided the KJV which is adequate for this passage. UBS lists no textual variants for this passage. The reader would not necessarily know that there were any textual variants for the passage, and would certainly not expect there to be any significant ones or know what they were. Buried in the footnotes of the Nestle-Aland, however, is notification that a manuscript variant does exist and some manuscripts read:

We will not know what the committee's reasoning for excluding the variant was since they only gave the reasoning for variants listed in the UBS edition. The interesting thing is that the papyri are missing for this passage. For example, this verse falls into a hole in the manuscript in the Chester Beatty codex of the Pauline epistles (P. Chester Beatty II = P46). There is very little manuscript evidence of any sort for the passage before the eighth century; only six manuscripts before the eighth century have the passage at all. The formatting of the passage in Sinaiticus as a list with each entry on a separate line makes it easy to see how it could have dropped out. The homoteleuton (dropping of words because they have similar endings) explains how it could have dropped out (although it is less expected in the first term in a series). Dropping out words for no apparent reason is common, and typical in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The reading with adultery is decently attested in earlier manuscripts.

Whether or not one thinks that the UBS committee adopted the correct reading, it would be incorrect to say that it is not significant. Blomberg has hedged his bets by including the word "seldom" in his assessment, but people should not assume that a variant not listed in UBS is insignificant. While I appreciate why Blomberg made the argument he did, I do not think he is correct.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

I have looked at the NSYR data on teenagers and emerging adults losing their religion for information about why LDS youth and young adults level the Church. There is other literature that addresses that topic. Today's view is from Jeremy E. Uecker, Mark D. Regnerus, and Margaret L. Vaaler, "Losing My Religion: The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood," Social Forces 85/4 (2007): 1667-1692. This study, based on a different data set, looked at decline in religious service attendance, decline in importance of religion and disaffiliation from religion. Unfortunately, Latter-day Saints were put in the other category and so do not have separate statistics. It is interesting that unlike NSYR, the other religion category (which in this study included Latter-day Saints) had the lowest decline in religious service attendance, but the highest disaffiliation from religion (which is similar to the NSYR). After multivariate analysis the authors found the following reasons for religious decline among young adults:

Both cohabitation and frequent extramarital sex cause a decrease in church attendance and increase the likelihood of disaffiliation with a religion. (It is important to note that cohabitation no longer necessarily means setting up a separate household together.)

Taking risks is frequently associated with decrease in church attendance.

Not attending college is associated with both decrease in church attendance and increased likelihood of disaffiliation. The authors specifically deny that college promotes disaffiliation or decline in importance of religion, although they note that there is a decline in religious service attendance. They also note an exception: "Those who do major in these fields [those whose classes might challenge religious faith] -- the social sciences and the humanities -- are the most likely to diminish their religiosity" (p. 1669).

Using drugs (the study only looked at marijuana usage) is associated with both decrease in church attendance and increased likelihood of disaffiliation.

Alcohol use played less of a role in decreased religiosity.

Marriage is associated with an increase in church attendance and decreases likelihood of disaffiliation.

While a decline in church attendance is not associated with a decline in the importance of religion frequency of extramarital sex is.

Intellectual reasons did not figure in this study, but the behavioral patterns match those of the NSYR with the exception of alcohol use. The study did note this:

There is less of a difference between those who increased their drinking and those who did not, although respondents who drank more at Wave III than at Wave I diminish their religious service attendance at noticeably higher rates. (p. 1677.)

While not exactly pointing to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll as reasons for losing one's religion, the study does seem to point to sex, drugs, and lack of college.